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Who Invented the Linux-Based Wireless Router?
mtaht writes "I've just had the interesting experience of being deposed to talk about one of the first embedded, Linux-based, wireless routers. Our (free!) 1998 publication of how to make one predates patent #7035281, filed September 13, 2000, by someone else. Their patent was recently granted and is now being disputed in court, in part using our how-to as an example of prior art. The lawsuit continues; the case goes before a judge shortly, and a jury trial if necessary is scheduled for the spring. I find myself plagued with the question: So... who invented the embedded Linux based wireless router? What relevance does 'who' have, when there is such an enormous confluence of ideas from thousands of people? What constitutes invention, anyway?"
Every new platform (almost by definition of the term "platform") allows it to be married to myriad other technologies. Unfortunately the USPTO does not seem to understand that each one of these secondary permutations does not (should not) constitute "invention".
But ultimately -- the answer, like most answers to legal questions, isn't a matter of who's right and who's wrong, or even "what is the truth?". The answer depends on who has the combination of legal-budget and willpower to pursue the patent.
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Do they have to prove exact prior art, if they can prove that the differences between the prior art and the patent are obvious to a practitioner of the art?
A patent really should only cover non-obvious extensions of existing ideas. As the guy himself states, there was nothing in what he did that was particularly non-obvious to any person who did networking at the time, so it's silly that it should even be patentable, let alone an example of prior art. Rather, their effort just happened to occur at a point in time where wireless networking was just being introduced.
So why on earth should merely combining the words "embedded", "Linux", "wireless" and "router" make something patentable? These are not novel combinations that required a leap of creative insight, but rather extremely straightforward and obvious combinations.
Our submitter is doing the right thing here; testifying against a company that tried to patent an already freely available idea. No patent should be allowed to protect this device's software. The hardware is a separate issue. Thanks for doing the right thing!
This is the NSA, we're gonna geet U h@x0r5! Also, what is a h@x0r5?
whatever the judge at the highest level court that will hear your case says it is.
How can someone get a patent on an obvious implementation of a new standard, in this case 802.11? I wonder if Anthony Spearman or Andrew Tompkins had any access or input into the standard? I wonder if they were part of the standards process but realized they couldn't patent the standard so the patented the implementation.
Did you even read TF Summary? He is the prior art! He's just trying to figure out if there was someone there before him, or how to give credit to those pieces which were already built into the Linux code.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
In our economy: Invention is the right to a revenue stream if you can afford patent law litigation.
You just quoted excerpts from the summary of the invention. It goes through such drivel as explaining the OSI model and other known-in-the-art fluff intended to bog down the examiner. That text has no bearing on the validity of the patent. The claims are all that matter, with claim 1 being the most important. That claim doesn't cover any new ground and just mentions an obvious combination of networking components, packet routing, and an authentication mechanism as provided by the 802.11 standard.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.